IPv6 Vyatta LAB – Part II OSPF as IGP

In the previous part we gave our lab routers loopback addresses and verified that the routers do communicate via Internet Protocol version 6.The lab should now look like this:

Let’s take a look at the IPv6 routing table.

show ipv6 route

You will see only addresses that are connected directly to that router. So if you are at R1, you will see 2001:99:13:4a::1/128 plus the link-local addresses of each interface on R1.

If you would try to ping R2 with address 2001:99:13:4a::2 it will not respond to you. The reason for this is that since there are no routes, R1 does not know where to send traffic that is supposed to go to 2001:99:13:4a::2 and even if it did, R2 does not know how to return packets.

In the next episode we will add BGP to this network and the BGP adjacencies will be created using lab router’s loopback addresses. Since the loopbacks are now unreachable, this would not work.

Now you could write static route and thus tell R1 from where to find the address 2001:99:13:4a::2 but that would spoil the whole thing. We are trying to make a network that has a dynamic routing.

So we want to add an IGP.

The job of the Interior Gateway Protocol is to make sure that the core nodes of this network will find each other at all times. They need to find each other’s loopback addresses.

You will want to add every interface that points to other routers in your core. Do not forget to add loopback as well. Give each router an id. This id is typically the the same as the IPv4 loopback address of your router.